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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The Pope in Turkey: Continuing to Develop a Bond with the Orthodox

Pope Francis‘ sixth international trip is taking him to Turkey, where
he plans to push forward with reconciliation efforts with the
Orthodox Church, promote dialogue with Islam and give hope to the
endangered Christian minorities in the Middle East.

Vatican City (dpa) - Pope Francis will reach out to the Orthodox
Church this weekend by travelling to Turkey, in a trip where he is
also expected to speak out against the persecution of Christians in
the Middle East.

Strengthening ties with the Orthodox Church, which split from Rome in
the 1054 schism, will be the main focus of the November 28-30 trip,
which will take the Argentine-born head of the Catholic Church to
Ankara and Istanbul.

"We are not different religions. We are brothers who have grown apart
along the way, each sure of following the path indicated by the
Lord," Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, told
Italian Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana ahead of the visit.

The reconciliation efforts are not made any easier by the fact that
while Bartholomew is the top patriarch of the Orthodox world, he
cannot impose his views on the leaders of more than a dozen other
Orthodox churches.

By contrast, the pope is the absolute ruler of the Catholic Church,
meaning it is unclear whether any deal between Francis and
Bartholomew would be endorsed by the other Orthodox churches.

Efforts to heal their rift started in 1964, when Pope Paul VI and
Patriarch Athenagoras held a historic meeting in Jerusalem.

Bartholomew now says completing the process will take "effort,
patience, prayers, reciprocal love and respect, and welcoming
[spirit]."

In Istanbul, the pope will join Bartholomew in celebrating the
November 30 Feast of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of the Orthodox
world. The two will also sign a joint declaration. Francis‘
predecessor, Benedict XVI, did the same in 2006.

"I‘m looking forward to this meeting with great expectations,"
Wolfgang Thoenissen of the Institute for Ecumenics in Paderborn,
Germany, told dpa. "One has to understand that this, in its entirety,
has symbolic value."

Francis will land in Istanbul on Saturday. On that day, he is
scheduled to visit the Hagia Sophia, once the largest church in
Christendom. It was converted into a mosque following the Ottoman
conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and turned into a museum in 1935.

He is also due to visit the Sultan Ahmet Mosque - widely known a the
Blue Mosque - and celebrate mass in Istanbul‘s Catholic Cathedral,
where he will meet representatives of Turkey‘s small Christian
community.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi says Francis will likely
use the occasion to meet Christian refugees from Iraq, after
tentative plans for him to visit them across the border in the
Kurdish regions of Iraq were dropped due to security reasons.

Christian presence in the Middle East has been dwindling for decades,
but recently there has been a mass exodus of community members from
Iraq and Syria as a result of the steady advance of the Islamic State
extremist group.

"We cannot be resigned to imagining a Middle East without
Christians," Francis said last month.

The Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq, Louis Raphael
Sako, has compared Islamic State attacks on Christian and Yazidi
minorities in Iraq to the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

"These barbarous acts, which will always be a blot in human history,
are promoted by organizations and ideologies similar to the Nazis and
other totalitarian political philosophies," Sako said last week at a
meeting of Muslim and Christian leaders in Vienna.

Francis, for his part, is likely to deliver a message of brotherhood
to Islam, as he visits a nominally secular but overwhelmingly Muslim
nation where religious minorities, including Catholics and Orthodox,
regularly complain about harassment.

According to Vatican expert John L Allen of the Crux Catholic
website, endangered Middle East Christians are looking for words of
encouragement.

"The key question on this front about the pope‘s three-day visit
(...) is whether at the end of it Christians will feel as if they‘re
in a stronger position to ride out the storm than they were before
the pope came," he writes.

Known for his no-frills approach, Francis will be welcomed in Ankara
on Friday by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his new
palace, which has been criticized for being excessively lavish. It
cost 615 million dollars and has 1,000 roooms, according to local
reports.

The pope will also visit the mausoleum of the founder of modern
Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Amid terrorist threat warnings, Francis will use an armoured car. But
the Vatican has downplayed security concerns, saying an open-topped
popemobile has been ruled out only because no crowds are expected to
line up the streets to greet the papal motorcade.

Turkey is the pope‘s sixth international trip, after Brazil, the Holy
Land, South Korea, Albania and Tuesday‘s visit to Strasbourg, France.
He plans to go to Sri Lanka and the Philippines in January.